The parliamentary leader of the PCP advocated this Sunday that, with the absolute majority of the PS, “the speech of inevitability” returned, from the deterioration of the living conditions of the Portuguese, and challenged him to accept the communist proposals in the budget .
“The discourse of inevitability has returned, as if we were condemned to a fatality, but it doesn’t have to be,” Paula Santos, before the deputies and communist militants at the Party’s National Conference, in Corroios, Seixal, which ends this Sunday with the speech of the elected general secretary, Paulo Raimundo.
“What predominates are the impositions of the absolute majority”, reinforced the deputy, and the deterioration in the living conditions of the Portuguese in recent months are consequences of the “political options of the PS sidelined by the right-wing parties”, such as the failure to of a solution of the “structural problems” and “inequality in the distribution of wealth”.
A year ago, the PCP rejected making the 2022 state budget proposal feasible and Paula Santos defended that the country’s current realities reinforce this decision. When “salary and pension valuation” was required, the PS was against and “a year later the problems got worse” because of that option, he added.
The Decent Work Agenda was presented by the Socialist government as a solution to valuing workers, but the communist group’s leader deemed it “worth it in name only, because its content is extremely harmful.”
In 2023, the “proclaimed state budget that the government never tires of repeating is the most left-wing ever” turned out to be the opposite, he opined.
As part of the discussion on next year’s budget bill proposal, the PCP has delivered an amendment project that includes taxes on extraordinary profits of the largest companies, free daycare for children of all ages, a general wage increase and, among other things, the national minimum wage and rent control.
Now the socialists will have to “position themselves against these PCP proposals,” Paula Santos challenged.
Margarida Botelho, a member of the PCP secretariat, spoke within the party and called on the militants to “do the ant job” and give “incentive and confidence” to those who need to take the first step.
The PCP’s role is “to take the initiative (…) to provide contacts, conversations and space for convergence that make injustice a force to fight,” this CC member said.
It is “an ant’s work, of elucidation and construction, which is mass work, daring and confident at the same time,” he said.
“A contact that allows the party to know and learn a lot about the most diverse realities, enriching the analysis, proposal and action in various areas of our intervention,” he added.
According to Margarida Botelho, this work does not represent “nothing strange or new” in the PCP, on the contrary, “it is a usual style of work, inherent in our project, essential for its implementation, to which we must pay more attention”.
“On the contrary, nothing prevents each cell from having a list of colleagues with whom it talks about the situation of the company, the place, the country, the world. Who listen and learn from them, but who make them think and clarify. Who they invite to the Festa do Avante! or other initiatives of the party, to whom they send the party’s proposal on this or that topic, to whom they propose to support the CDU candidates,” he said, leading to a huge round of applause in the audience.
Source: DN
